Access your Pro+ Content below.

High-end storage on an SMB budget

Storage August 2006 Special Supplement Storage, like every other computer technology, is getting faster, smaller and cheaper. For many shops, the operative word is "cheaper," as tight IT budgets often dictate purchase considerations and sometimes even trump defined requirements. Limited spending power is usually associated with smaller companies, but even large enterprises can find themselves strapped when faced with the storage needs of numerous remote offices. Disk prices continue to spiral downward, while performance and reliability have improved. Prices down, performance up translates into inexpensive networked storage systems with the power that pricey enterprise arrays delivered only a generation or two ago. Storage hardware may be approaching "commodity" status with cheap, interchangeable parts, but it's still a far cry from the commoditization of the PC market. Not long ago, a decent desktop PC would set you back $2,000 or more. For that same amount of money today, you can snap up a dual-processor server and still ...

Features
in this issue

Based on the familiar TCP/IP networking protocol, iSCSI arrays are easy to implement and manage, and cheaper than Fibre Channel (FC)-based systems. They're also becoming a popular alternative to NAS and DAS for SMBs and remote office locations.

We profile five companies that have deployed, or are currently testing, storage virtualization and analyze their implementation experiences. The storage pros behind these efforts tell us how the products they chose are working in their production environments.

The most common shortcoming of a data classification project is the perception that it can be completed through technical analysis at the storage layer without engaging business users. While discovering and analyzing storage is part of the process, good classification requires engaging business users or their IT representatives.

Disk is increasingly a key part of the backup process, and many companies are taking the virtual tape library (VTL) route to disk-based backup. But all VTLs aren't the same. Find out the key differences among VTL products, and how they might work in your shop.

Policy-based storage management can automate the data recovery process. But you need to know what types of policies various products support, where the policy manager resides and what it's capable of doing.

This first of a three-part series on data migration products focuses on host-level data migration products. Data migration apps can automate, centralize and simplify data migrations while ensuring data integrity.

Columns
in this issue

E-mail archiving gets a lot of the attention these days, but databases shouldn't be overlooked. Database administrators end up managing old and unchanging data within their production databases, so backups are constantly protecting data that hasn't changed.

Storage Bin: In the last year, 91% of large corporations have been through an electronic discovery request. Thirty-three percent of these companies go through one or more requests per month, while 66% of midmarket companies have the same issue. And more than 50% of the time, the requests aren't satisfied.

The cost of each gigabyte of storage is declining rapidly in every segment of the market. Enterprise storage today costs what desktop storage did less than a decade ago. So why are overall costs increasing?